Sign of the Knife Read online

  And this way, Domhnall could get both me and his explosives into the city. He would have what he needed to attack the palace, and I would be in position to do what I’d been training for.

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  He was also paying me an unheard-of amount for such an easy job. Twenty silver coin just to carry a feed sack onto a boat.

  All the gods knew Cat and I needed coin.

  But at the same time, it felt strange. Almost… wrong.

  Right and wrong both. I wanted to prove I was as brave and worthy as Mama always told us our father had been. I wanted to have adventures. To prove who I was.

  To find who I was.

  I needed to do something more than farm in this infuriatingly poor and tiny village. I wanted to help Domhnall, to fight the king and his collectors who took everything the people had.

  But carrying explosives into Climonta meant taking a step I could never take back. It was treason. King Derrik knew Domhnall was planning an attack on the palace soon, and his soldiers were searching anyone they thought might be involved. The public beheadings weren’t just in Climonta anymore. A book seller in Woodall, just up the road from Brynn, had been beheaded last autumn, not two moons ago. He and his entire family were executed, including the children. It was gruesome beyond belief.

  No one was sure exactly what he had done. But everyone knew what the consequence was.

  More than anything, more even than figuring out who I was, I needed to take care of Catriona. Unlike me, she loved Brynn our little village of Brynn. She was happy here and would hate the idea of moving to the city. I couldn’t do everything all at once—

  fight King Derrik, prove I was brave, have adventures, stay safe and protect and provide for Catriona. My thoughts were a jumble.

  Oh, how desperately I wished Mama was here. If she were alive, I could go fight the king and she would care for Catriona.

  They would embroider and quilt and have cozy evenings beside the fire together. I would be free to do what I had to do.

  But they wouldn’t be safe. Not if I was caught carrying explosives into Climonta. Not if the reason I’d been getting so 13

  good at throwing knives was discovered. They would be executed for my crimes.

  No one would truly be safe. Not until Domhnall succeeded.

  Not until Derrik was off the throne.

  And Mama wasn’t here.

  The closest I could come to sitting beside her was here, beside her boxes.

  Her key hung on the nail in the bedpost where she’d kept it at night. I picked it up.

  “Please!” Catriona said. “It’s not like her embroidery floss is going to help us get food. We have our own floss. And yes! We can make a quilt or two with the fabric, but that’s not going to go quickly, and without her, we won’t get much for anything you and I make. Please, Mira. Please don’t.”

  I felt the copper tokens in my pocket and still didn’t make eye contact. The boat was leaving in three days. That wasn’t much time to pack and prepare.

  Twenty silver crowns. That was how much Domhnall would paying me when we reached Climonta. It was more than I could make in a year by selling eggs, embroidery, or quilts. And once we were in the city, I would be in position to help bring down the king himself.

  Despite all my training with knives, the thought of actually killing a person—even King Derrik—made me feel sick.

  Then I thought of Mama and how, if we’d had coin for medicine or a doctor from Woodall, she might still be alive. I fingered the tokens through the cloth of my skirt and made myself look at Catriona. “I don’t think we can stay here.”

  She tipped her head. “What do you mean. Of course we can. Where else would we go?”

  “We don’t have any way to make enough coin to feed ourselves.”

  “We know how to embroider.” She looked offended. “And what do you mean, not stay here? Where else would we go?”

  14

  “We can’t embroider like Mama. You know that.”

  Mama had been gifted with embroidery. Her fingers turned thread into patterns like stained glass windows. She would spend a few coin on floss, sit in her rocker beside the fire, and work magic.

  A few days later, she had a masterpiece fit for a palace. Sometimes she made simple things to sell here in Brynn, or in Woodall—

  aprons or dish cloths or baby wraps. Sometimes she embroidered squares and pieced them into quilts. She sold the fancier things to traveling merchants who paid her well and resold them in the city.

  Catriona inherited Mama’s talents, along with her looks.

  Cat’s pieces didn’t come to life quite like Mama’s, but they were lovely. Mine were, frankly, terrible. I was decent at quilting. But while it seemed Mama and Catriona could look at a piece of fabric and see images waiting to spring to life, I saw only threads and fabric. While I stitched, my mind wandered to where the fibers for the threads had come from, how coins changed hands from distant silk farmers to merchants to Mama and back again, what poor people might do if the coins were their own and not the king’s, and different ways the people could band together to outwit royal collectors or overthrow the king.

  Thoughts like that, it turns out, are not marketable in the village of Brynn. Or anywhere else for that matter. They get you killed. When I mentioned my ideas to Mama, she blanched so that even her lips went the color of parchment. It seemed sometimes that everything I did displeased her. I learned to keep my thoughts to myself.

  I couldn’t embroider very well. But I could hunt. So while Mama and Catriona made lovely things, I brought home rabbits and grouse and occasionally a deer. I helped take the quilts to market and negotiate prices with the merchants. I was always fascinated by the merchants. Which is how I met Roland.

  “We can work for Amara and Elim,” Catriona said. “I mean, we haven’t asked them, but I think they’ll let us.”

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  “They can barely feed themselves. It’s not like they have extra coin to feed us. It’s not going to work for us to stay here.”

  She looked confused. “We don’t have any place else to go.”

  I took in a deep breath. “Actually, we do.”

  She dropped her potato peeler. “Wait. Is this about Roland?

  You said he didn’t ask you to marry him.” She looked at my hands. “Show me your hands. Did he give you a bracelet?”

  I pulled my hands out of my pockets and held them up.

  “No bracelet. I told you.”

  “Then what are you talking about?”

  I pulled the two copper tokens from my pocket and dropped them on the counter beside the potato peeler. They clinked against each other, the most pitiful of peace offerings.

  “What are those?”

  “I have a way to make money.” Please, I thought. Please don’t cry. Please be good with this. Please.

  She narrowed her eyes. “How?”

  “I’m going to take a package to Climonta. A feed sack.

  He’s paying me. And—” I sucked in a breath. “And if we live in Climonta, I can keep doing jobs for him. And he will keep paying me. It’s a lot of money, Cat.”

  “Who’s paying you? Roland?”

  “Someone else. It’s better if you don’t know.” I kept my voice quiet, to calm her. And the truth was, I didn’t fully know the answer. No one knew who Domhnall really was. He and all the Order members were safer that way. He shared his plans with a few close advisors, including Roland, and they shared them with us. We helped him fight the king’s injustices and hopefully, eventually, we would remove King Derrik, his son, Prince Joren, and all the royal family from power. Domhnall would take control of the kingdom. He was brilliant, and he was fighting. And that was all I needed to know.

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  “You’re planning to move to Climonta and you won’t even tell me who’s paying you?” Her voice was rising. “Really? And what’s in this feed sack you’re getting paid so much to carry? I’m guessing it’s not chicken feed.”

  “I don
’t know that either.” My face burned with the lie.

  “Are you kidding me?” She stared. “You don’t know?

  You’re just going to abandon me and run off with Roland to deliver who-knows-what to who-knows-who and hope that someone will pay you? And now that Mama’s dead you’re going to disobey everything she asked you to do?”

  “I’m not disobeying anything!”

  “Yes, you are! You know she didn’t like your ideas of traveling. She would barely even take us to Woodall. She wanted us to stay away from the city, from the king, from anything that could hurt us. And you’re disobeying her!”

  I gaped at her. “She’s dead! I think the rules have changed!

  She didn’t want us to sit here and starve. She would have wanted us to take care of ourselves.”

  “And that’s what we should do! Here. In Brynn. Like she wanted us to. She didn’t teach you to move to Climonta and work for other people. She taught you to work hard here! At home!”

  “And look where that got her.” I waved my hand at the back of the house, toward the funeral pyre where we’d burned her body so recently it felt like yesterday. “I don’t want that to happen to you. I want to protect you.”

  “Really? Because it looks like you’re abandoning me! Are you even planning to send money back here? Doesn’t family matter to you at all? First Mama dies and then you just decide to run off on some adventure with Roland, without me? And you’re saying you want to protect me?”

  “It’s not Roland!” I shouted. “Great skies, Cat! I’m not running off with Roland! He’s not even going on the boat with us.

  And I’m not leaving you!” I picked up the tokens. “Look! We have two tokens! Two! You’re coming too!”

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  She stared at the tokens in my hand. “The other token is for me? I thought it was for Roland. You want me to move to Climonta with you?”

  I nodded. Please say yes. Please be good with this.

  “Of all the crazy, stupid, pig-headed ideas! Did Woon himself bite you out there tonight? Are you completely crazy?”

  She snatched up the potato peeler and started shredding the entire potato into the bucket. “No one! Is moving! To Climonta!”

  “We can survive in Climonta! We’ll have food!” I motioned to the potato she was peeling—one of our last. “Do you have a better idea?”

  “Yes! In case you weren’t listening, I do! We can work for Amara and Emil. We can sell embroidery and quilts like Mama taught us to. We can stay in our home,” she emphasized the word,

  “and do the things we know how to do. So yes! I do have a better idea!” She threw the half-shredded potato into the bucket and began to cry.

  “I can’t do those things. You know I can’t! I can barely embroider anything. I can’t piece a quilt. And you’re good at it, but you’re slow. You know you can’t make enough to keep us through the winter. And I can’t take care of you if we stay here.

  Please, Cat. This is a chance for me to do something! To make a difference in the world! To do what I’m good at for once, to earn money for food, and make the kingdom a safer place for everyone, including you.”

  “I’m not going!” She threw the peeler into the bucket with the potato and ran past me, up the ladder into our room. I heard the thump as she dove onto her bed and begin sobbing.

  I stood there, listening to her cries. Then I fished the peeler out of the bucket and pulled the potato shreds out too. We used to give the peels to the chickens, but I scooped them all into a pan, added a little butter and hung the pan over the fire. I would have added salt, but it was gone. I stirred the potatoes while listening to Catriona crying harder than she had cried even when Mama died.

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  It made me sick to lie to her. But if she knew about the explosives, she would never agree to come. The less she knew, the safer she would be.

  The smell of something burning brought me back. I snatched the pan off the fire and dumped the potatoes onto a platter. I shoved the tokens into a jar to get them out of sight and poured water from the jug into our cups.

  Catriona had stopped crying.

  I stood at the bottom of the ladder, listening. She might have been asleep. I put one foot on the bottom rung, then changed my mind and took it off again. “Cat?”

  There was no answer.

  “The potatoes are cooked, if you want some.”

  Nothing.

  We would have to go. That was all there was to it. She was always a dreamer, wishing things were different than they were.

  But the fact was, we didn’t have enough to live on through winter and spring. And if we were leaving in a few days, I needed to start going through Mama’s things so we could pack what we could use and sell the rest.

  I got Mama’s key from the nail on the bedpost, sat on the rug and unlocked her quilting box. Fabric and thread and quilt patterns were neatly stacked inside. I started sorting through them.

  Cat came down when the quilting box was nearly empty.

  She looked at the piles of Mama’s things but didn’t say anything, just picked up her cup and sat in Mama’s rocking chair.

  “She has a lot of patterns,” I said.

  Catriona didn’t answer.

  “I mean, really a lot.”

  She looked at the fire.

  “Are you hungry?”

  She didn’t say anything. Just rocked and stared into the fire.

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  I was going to say we should take the patterns with us, but I decided against it. Instead, I pulled Mama’s personal box over and unlocked it.

  Catriona closed her eyes and her lip trembled, but she didn’t say anything.

  Mama’s hairbrush was on top, and the sight of it made me choke with tears. Her good hair scarf—the pink one with mira blossoms, the flower I was named after—and a pair of stockings lay beside it. I felt oddly disconnected from my body as I lifted out the things I’d seen Mama use every day. She could have been sitting beside me, should have been talking and laughing, telling us about what happened that day, asking what we’d learned in our studies, planning which vegetables we’d plant in the garden. I could feel her in the room so strongly that when I looked up, I half expected to see her sitting in the rocker.

  But Catriona sat in Mama’s chair, sipping water, watching me.

  There weren’t many things in this box. Under the hair scarf were a few ribbons she’d tied her hair with. A tiny pillow she’d embroidered and kept for herself. Some seashells she’d brought from Aloysia when she came to Brynn years ago—when I was a baby and Catriona was growing inside her. A book and quill she used to keep her accounts. I thought I’d pulled everything out, but at the bottom lay a single sheet of parchment, face down.

  I lifted it out, expecting another embroidery or quilt pattern. I was surprised to see a sketch of our fireplace.

  “What is it?”

  I turned it so Catriona could see.

  She studied it for a moment, then took a shuddering breath and walked to the kitchen. “Maybe she was going to embroider the fireplace on something.”

  “That would be an odd subject. And why keep it in her personal box?”

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  Catriona dished up potatoes as I looked at the sketch. Every stone was drawn exactly as it was on our fireplace. It was accurate, but not the kind of thing she was likely to embroider. I wanted to ask her about it, but that was now impossible. I looked at the sketch for a long time, and finally, I set it aside.

  “I’m going to sleep,” I said when we’d eaten out potatoes. I looked at the piles of Mama’s things spread all over the rug. “We can take care of these tomorrow.”

  I slipped into my night clothes and pulled the covers up to my chin. In the darkness of our room, I silently sobbed. He hadn’t given me a wedding bracelet. He had so many. So many there on his table at market! And he couldn’t give one to me. Even if we didn’t get married until summer, he could have given me one as a promise.

  Mama was gone. And I was more co
nfused than I’d ever been in my life.

  I closed my eyes and tried not to make any sound as tears leaked into my hair and soaked my pillow.

  In the middle of the night, I was suddenly wide awake. The fireplace drawing was clear in my mind, as if I had been studying it in my sleep. And something stood out. One stone was drawn darker than the rest. Was the drawing really like that, I wondered.

  Or had I imagined it in my sleep?

  I rolled over, straw crinkling beneath me. Catriona lay in her bed, an arm’s length away. Moonlight from our small window fell on her golden hair.

  I crept down the ladder and lit a candle.

  Yes. In her drawing, one stone to the side of the fireplace was outlined darker than the rest.

  I lifted the candle and went to the fireplace. The stone outlined in her sketch looked exactly like every other stone.

  Medium sized. Grey. I looked back at the parchment. That one 21

  stone was definitely, subtly emphasized. Was Mama trying to say something about that stone?

  I ran my finger around the stone. A chink of loose mortar fell away. I ran my finger over the mortar around the other stones, but nothing came loose.

  I scraped my fingernail into the mortar around the first stone, and a bigger piece came loose. I got a small knife from the kitchen and wedged it into the space. I chiseled out another chunk of mortar. And then another. They fell to the hearth and I scraped faster.

  “What are you doing?” Catriona peered over the edge of our bedroom floor.

  “I think this stone might come out.”

  “The drawing?”